I am a PhD student at UC Berkeley, advised by Alessandro Chiesa. My work focuses on the application of algebraic techniques to zero knowledge proof systems. My interests include interactive proof systems, zero knowledge, coding theory and computational complexity.

In summer 2018 I was an intern at IBM Research Zürich, working with Jan Camenisch.

I received my master's degree in theoretical computer science from ETH Zürich, Switzerland, in 2015.

I received my bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Cambridge in 2013. My bachelor's thesis was Implementation and evaluation of algebraic algorithms for graph isomorphism.

• Fractal: Post-Quantum and Transparent Recursive Proofs from Holography
  Alessandro Chiesa, Dev Ojha and Nicholas Spooner.
  Eurocrypt 2020, to appear.
• Succinct Arguments in the Quantum Random Oracle Model
  Alessandro Chiesa, Peter Manohar and Nicholas Spooner.
  TCC 2019, Nuremberg, Germany. QIP 2020, Shenzhen, China.
• Linear-Size Constant-Query IOPs for Delegating Computation
  Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Lior Goldberg, Tom Gur, Michael Riabzev and Nicholas Spooner.
  TCC 2019, Nuremberg, Germany.
• Aurora: Transparent Succinct Arguments for R1CS
  Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Michael Riabzev, Nicholas Spooner, Madars Virza and Nicholas P. Ward.
  Eurocrypt 2019, Darmstadt, Germany.
• Spatial Isolation Implies Zero Knowledge Even in a Quantum World
  Alessandro Chiesa, Michael A. Forbes, Tom Gur and Nicholas Spooner.
  FOCS 2018, Paris, France. QIP 2019, Boulder, CO, USA.
  (includes work from preprint A Zero Knowledge Sumcheck and its Applications.)
• Zero Knowledge Protocols from Succinct Constraint Detection
  Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Michael A. Forbes, Ariel Gabizon, Michael Riabzev and Nicholas Spooner.
  TCC 2017, Baltimore MD, USA.
• Interactive Oracle Proofs with Constant Query Complexity and Rate
  Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Ariel Gabizon, Michael Riabzev and Nicholas Spooner.
  ICALP 2017, Warsaw, Poland.
• Interactive oracle proofs
  Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa and Nicholas Spooner.
  TCC 2016-B, Beijing, China.
• Fixed-Budget Performance of the (1+1)-EA on Linear Functions
  Johannes Lengler and Nicholas Spooner.
  ACM/SIGEVO Foundations of Genetic Algorithms XIII (FOGA 2015), Aberystwyth, UK.

• A Zero Knowledge Sumcheck and its Applications
  Alessandro Chiesa, Michael A. Forbes and Nicholas Spooner.
  ePrint 2017/305
• Evaluation and Benchmarking for Robot Motion Planning Problems Using TuLiP
  Nicholas Spooner.
  Caltech Technical Report (2012).

Contact: last name [at] eecs [dot] berkeley [dot] edu ; Soda 615